Here comes summer!

Nothing reminds me of my childhood, more than bales of hay. The sight of them in the fields around our home for waifs and strays always makes me sigh. The freshly cut grass left drying in the sun
tells me that summer has arrived again.

‘Come down off that tractor!’ my poor father used to shout at me. ‘They don’t need your help with the
hay!’ What he was trying to say was, ‘I’m afraid of you falling under its wheels!’ But spending my entire childhood in the country, taught me to take risks!

I scrumped apples from the farmer’s orchards then ran like a rabbit when he chased me with a gun. I climbed and fell out of trees and rode half wild ponies bare back, down through the valley and across the beach. There wasn’t a cave I hadn’t
entered in the steep cliffs surrounding our home. It was no wonder my father worried.

But sitting with my comics on a summer’s day, leaning against a bale
of hay, was one of my greatest memories of all. Perhaps it was the peacefulness, the simplicity of the time I spent growing up in a child’s paradise.